Snow Blind
by Albino Magpie
Summary: Bakura is a professional thief on a mission. His latest heist takes him somewhere that is not anywhere. Casteshipping, AU, written for a contest.


**A/N: **A dieselpunk AU. Yay. Though the dieselpunk was sold a little short. I like the universe though, I might make a sequel.

Bakura's gloved hand slipped on the aircraft's control stick. He cursed. The padding was making it difficult to get a grip, but his earlier attempt to take it off hadn't worked too well in this cold.

The wind blasted the small freight plane and the fraction of his face that was subjected to it already felt numb. He could barely hear himself think over the combined roar of the wind and the diesel engines. A glance at his radar showed that he was close to the longitude and latitude of the landing spot. That meant he had to land this heavy-to-steer piece of junk and make a fun trip out of the cabin's relative shelter into the frozen hell-hole that called itself the Antarctic.

He'd been incredulous when the Board told him about this mission. It wasn't normal recon procedure. His squad was a redemption squad. Two dozen men, clamouring for more space in the oil-cloth tents. Two women who got a small one to themselves and would have been regarded as useless if they hadn't each killed more men than present in the squad and two women. Not everyone's case was this big, but all of them were settled with some criminal charge or the other. They were being offered to use their often misapplied talents. They were supposed to help the Board of Archaeology with their "research" and thus gain their trust back.

Bakura for one couldn't see any sensible reason to send out traitors, sell outs and grave robbers to this place. What ever the hell the board was after would be valuable. There had been hints at an artefact, and that alone worried him. The Board got so excited about artefacts, and the most exciting ones were inescapably guarded by the ubiquitous "Things best left alone". In other words, scary bullshit that was part of the United Kingdom's everyday curriculum.

The modified Flettner plane lost a few feet, a brutal blast of wind interfering with the rotors. Bakura swore again, wishing the entire Board to hell. They had given out terrible equipment. The engine gave a few mechanic coughs, a signal that it was still holding out. Barely. The constant sputtering was an annoying sound, but it was familiar to any pilot. Things only got really dangerous once machines _stopped_ making a noise. He was still a few miles off the mark his superiors had pointed out to him, but the machine's drunken tumbling worried him. The Flettner plane was supposed to steady itself with the rotors, but its flat sides meant the wind could flip it over if the pilot's luck was really bad.

Radio static added its sound to the rest.

"_Bakura, you okay? There's wind where you're headed." _an almost unintelligible voice called out.

Bakura scoffed. A storm, really? Amazing, he hadn't even noticed. He didn't recognize the voice. He didn't like his fellow redemption-ees much.

"_I know. I'm in it and the machine's acting up," _he replied tersely, "_what do I do?"_

The voice was scratchy with distance, but he could detect a sheepish air anyways.

"_Boss says you keep going for the landing spot, see if you find something, go in if it seems okay. We'll send someone to pick you up."_

Bakura cursed, in Arabic. The rotors echoed this with a scraping noise that sounded like nothing so much as an oath of their own.

"_I'm sorry,"_ the scratchy voice said,

_You mean you're lucky it's not you, _Bakura thought. He could hardly feel his hands anymore.

"_You have a blaster, right?"_

He did have a blaster all right. It would have been outmoded and weak if he hadn't applied some of his very own weaponry knowledge to it. Of course he didn't get worried, not after all the missions he'd been on. But still, blasting in alone? It felt like the Board was trying to pick them off.

Not that he didn't deserve it, from their viewpoint. A bit of treason here, some selling of important military secrets there...he'd have to earn his redemption if he ever wanted a moment's peace from those pompous horse's arses.

He adjusted the course with numb hands, the radar telling him he was on target. The speakers crackled.

"_Another thing,"_ and here he recognized the drawl of small-time crook Valon, _"the board says not to worry; this place is cold."_

The rotors creaked. Bakura couldn't help laughing.

"_No shit," _he said, and killed the line. He needed his concentration for steering.

The weather here was savage. Still, he could count himself lucky if it was the only thing out to kill him Another gust of wind swiped at the plane, almost upsetting its equilibrium.

He angled the nose downwards, hands gripping the controls, equipment rattling and rivets creaking behind him. The plane turned sideways a little and down a lot, wind buffeting it from what seemed like all sides. It almost corkscrewed through the air and hit the ground with a _thump _and a final metallic rattle.

Bakura pried his fingers off of the the control stick and wished he'd stolen the design to a better aircraft. He'd have improved it, but he was born an armourer, not an engineer. Things that didn't have a trigger and a barrel confused him.

He unbuckled himself from his seat, slung the blaster's strap over one shoulder and took up the radio, hoping it would have any kind of range in this ice desert. The door swung up with some hesitation, which he could understand. He didn't want to be out there. The clean non-smell of snow was covered by the stink of diesel.

He landed heavily, his boots kicking up small clouds of snow. Deserts he knew about. But the ones he was used to weren't as cold, and besides this place lacked snakes. At least, looking up ahead to where a few dark shapes showed up against the blue-white expanse, he _hoped_ it lacked snakes.

Bakura could have cursed the sky (which was uniformly dirty white) blue. One thing he was more than a little put-out about was feeling like a walking laundry heap because of all the coats. But the excitement of going near a spot couldn't be denied, even if the Board – which couldn't be trusted on those matters anyways, as office-bound as they were – had claimed it to be cold. You never knew exactly how cold a place was until you walked in and checked.

Slowly, leaving a track as wide as a trench in the knee-deep snow, he walked towards the target. Which...moved? It must have been a trick of the light, but the low dark forms shifted as he approached. There appeared to be two, of about the same size.

What kind of artefact would he find in a barren place like this? A stone, or something of metal?

As far as he knew, they had brought the first metal to this continent. The dark oblongs might have been the camps of long-dead explorers. He had no great desire to join them.

It wasn't old camps. Or, if it was, they had been designed by the kind of people people who built castles with moats around them. There were actually four buildings, low, squat and made of stone. A lot of them was covered in snow and ice, but the visible parts appeared to be quite big.

Bakura stepped over the crunching snow into the middle of the buildings, a space like a courtyard. He wondered which one he should try to enter. There appeared to be patterns etched into the sides of the buildings, but they weren't in any language he'd studied. A certain likeness to Egyptian hieroglyphics was, however, unmistakeable.

Bakura unslung the blaster from his shoulder, set up the tripod and fixed the heavy contraption in place. The fuel sloshed in its chambers. He tried to strike a match, which sputtered. He tried five more in rapid succession, none of which burned long enough to light the fuel.

Grumbling about the absurd wind in this place, he patted his pockets until he located a lighter, which was theoretically storm-proof. It sparked, and he focussed the blaster's barrel on a mound of snow that looked likely to conceal an entrance or window of some sort.

The world seemed to go very quiet. That was odd, because apart from the wind, it had already been noiseless. It was more than silence. Ice filled his ears. The whole frozen world folded up on itself, incredibly heavy. It smothered him like a blanket, albeit one with razor sharp edges.

A voice was in his head, except that it was more a feeling, something inescapable and loud and infinitely old; „You will not burn me nor my house," the words were an impression on the inside of his skull, pushing the landscape tighter around him.

Bakura wasn't scared, not as such. A terrible wave of something that had went all the way into terror and come out on the other side, red-hot, itching and excited, passed through him. He breathed in, noticing in a detached way that his lungs hurt as if a vice was clamped around them. The world stretched and opened itself again. The antarctic landscape came back.

The bloom of fire that had shot from the blaster towards one ancient stone wall was pushed back almost gently and drifted under Bakura's feet like thistledown. It did not hurt him, but it ate away the snow he was standing on, so he found himself sinking in a tide of icy water suddenly. He remained relatively upright, the water evaporating to nothingness, more surprised than afraid. The four buildings loomed over him. When it stopped and he stood waist-deep in sludgy snow, the roofs were twenty feet over his head.

Bakura breathed out. The buildings were not buildings at all, but the tops of four enormous towers, all part of one giant structure. There was a window almost directly in front of him. The blaster was lost somewhere up ahead, a dark shape sticking out of a vertical snowdrift.

He was aware that there was nothing more than easily melted snow between him and some aeons old courtyard, far below. It could be gone in a few more moments. Unsteady in the frozen sludge, Bakura started for the window. It was glass-less, narrow and easily ten feet tall, more a slit than a window proper. He managed to climb on the sill and through the opening, but only after he had pulled off his outer coat.

When he landed inside, he saw that the coat wouldn't be needed. Whether due to the snow's insulating quality or because of something else, the tower was a bearable temperature on the inside.

Bakura clicked on the electric torch he carried. The cold white light outlined some sort of hall. He felt the artefacts he carried against regulation burning against his skin. The floor shook under his boots.  
>But then, the floor was and had always been perfectly still. It was him that was shaking. This place was ancient. It was deader than dead. It was, from the look of the stones, older and deader than the tombs of Egypt. But in Egypt, unlife sometimes remained in the graves as a caution to anyone looking to steal something valuable. And here, something had spoken to him. Not in English, or any other language he recognized, but in images. Things that made themselves understood.<p>

Bakura noticed now that there was another reason for his disquiet. The floor beneath his feet was uneven, sloping downwards. Instead of stairs, a ramp ran along the walls of the room, disappearing into the darkness above and below. The most likely way was down. The centre of the structure would be the first place to check. He started making his way down the ramp, shining the light around as he did so. Room after room was illuminated by the electric torch, all of them as empty as the first. As he descended, against all principles of reason it got warmer instead of colder.

Bakura kept shedding his overcoats and shawls, using them like a bread-crumb trail. Something beside the temperature perplexed him. A smell of locked-up attics pervaded the rooms, with a hint of something disturbingly organic.

His way took him past carvings on the walls, thin bands of countersunk relief. They appeared to be a kind of writing, one he couldn't decipher. The bands were parallel to the ramp, not the floor, winding their way down the structure. When he brought his hand up to trace a design, the artefact around his wrist burned against his skin, a hot shock of power that showed the carvings to be more than decoration.

Whatever was in this place, it would be strong. The governmental mages were content with playing spot-the-power-source but not very good at actually going and getting it. Shaadi, one of the worst offenders, was the one behind his mission. Bakura was relatively sure of that. His "trust" that had to be "earned" back would have to be won with some sort of statue or jewel or what-have-you that gave the British government maximum power.

He turned a corner. The next room was far wider than the tower had been, so his descent must have taken him below ground, not that it mattered much. There was a column in the centre of the room, wide and apparently covered by a layer of frost. It was devoid of carvings. Three more openings in all corners led into the other three towers. A set of surprisingly ordinary steps led him down, circumferencing the large room as the ramp had done.

The lower chambers where absurdly hot, the dark grey stone decorated by more relief bands. At this point Bakura was wearing only his inner layer of clothes, and he was feeling overheated even in them. Only his gloves had been kept on, shielding his rings and hands against whatever he might touch.

A stone slab shifted under his foot, almost knocking him off balance. Everything else in the building was in an absurdly impeccable condition, so this might have been something like a trap.

Something up ahead in the darkness made a scraping noise. Bakura levelled his pistol at it, followed moments later by the electric torch. The hallway he had been following down was very clean and very empty.

His torch flickered through the gloom, illuminating the walls. There was a group of symbols that repeated itself, enclosed by a flattened oval not unlike the cartouches he was used to. His knowledge of Egyptian hieroglyphics was incomplete, but it was a fair assumption to make that this was somebody's name.

Another sound was loud in the hot silence, and Bakura only just stopped himself from firing a shot at it. There was nothing, again. There would be nothing.

Sounds in darkness were a well-known enchantment, one that confused potential grave robbers by tricking them into visions of danger. He was not about to fall for it like some kind of novice.

Even so, the United Kingdom should count themselves lucky he was even willing to abolish his status as a traitor and help their noble work forward.

They were the leading grave robbers, incidents of the rich acquiring mummies for their own use were known and not glossed over. Bakura was half-hoping that whatever artefact of power he might discover would blow up in the English faces instead of giving them a leading edge over the French, perhaps the only ones even better at governmentally sanctioned tomb robbing.

A flash of light presented an impression of wide open space. The hall he was standing dwarfed all of the former ones in size, and for the first time there were furnishings present. They were statues, carved out of the ever-present grey-black stone. Depicted were figures humanoid only in their number of limbs, and sometimes not even that, in varying states of contortion. Feelers and pseudofeet were attached apparently at random to courtly figures, neat rows of inhuman appendages on the chests of mostly human-looking personages. They were all adorned with a kind of jewellery, but closer inspection showed it to be a kind of ordinary metal, not something that he knew to be of great value. And in the middle of the enormous space, which could have easily swallowed any modern public building, the ice-covered column reflected the electric light.

A flash of pain shot out from his chest and hands, where the amulets rested.

"Are you scared?" the words echoed through the hall, loud enough to make his eardrums ache, "Don't be scared." What- or whoever it was, they were speaking in English. Bakura advanced on the column, the apparent source of the sound, pistol at his hip. He had to suppress a noise of surprise when he saw its other side.

The column was hollow as a tube, open on one side, and inside that opening there was a throne. And on that throne, something sat. It – he – appeared to be a man as much as Bakura was one, in fact, they even shared the same shade of dark skin. He was unlike the strange statues, but his hair was a mess that stuck up, a style he had only previously seen on tribes of savages, and even in the gloom it appeared to be several vivid colours.

The man, if he was as much, was bedecked with so much of the strange metallic jewellery, it was doubtful that he would be able to move. Even if he were unweighed, Bakura saw upon drawing a little closer, he could not get up. Bands and chains of steel held him on his throne. He looked young, even though he must be old.

"Looking for something, thief?" the man asked. His voice was as dry as the arid air around them, and his eyes were glazed in a way that suggested death had already taken place. The skin on his face and hands was brittle-looking.

Bakura stood at the foot of the steps leading up to the throne, his expression defiant. Whoever this was, he was a relict. There were no men speaking his name now, and he was without power for it.

"I am looking for an item of power that will be in this place, and I will take it home." he said, his voice hard. Where the king had the gift of languages from, he did not know. It might have been a minor god imprisoned along with him, who gave him this as the last of his powers. He said as much. Something shook the floor so hard the ceiling shed dust. The terrible sculptures, artistically exquisite despite their grotesque subject matter, seemed more alive for a shocking moment. The man's voice echoed through the hall.

"My gods are not weak. My name is still spoken. I am the king. I AM the god."

Bakura was not scared. But he was impressed by this one's dedication. The relics that clung to their glorious past, imprisoned in tombs, were not often so convinced of themselves.

"Come up ahead," the voice said, this time seeming to bypass his ears and arrive in his head directly. An amulet burned against his chest, giving him an insight, and showing that what the Englishmen coveted was the pendant against the king's chest, a pyramidal structure of the same strange metal.

Bakura started up the steps. His hand was burning like he'd washed it in acid, and the burn slowly climbed up his arm as he advanced to the source of the power.

The king was wrapped in linen as a mummy might have been, from throat to ankles. The smell originated from him, not unpleasant but worryingly intense. On his chest and below the pendant, the linen wraps were raised in a row of bulges that made Bakura think of the statues surrounding them. He was glad that the so-called king's skin was hidden from view.

"Why," he asked, careful to keep his tone as light as he could, "can you speak English?"

Laughing. That ancient king who didn't even know how dead he was, he was laughing. His eyes were outlined with black and his hands, every finger in a clawlike metal sheath, looked to be fused to the throne. Would he be able to move them if he wanted to?

"I am not dead," the voice said, sounding so incredibly old to him. Voices like this, that hung on, they could be dangerous. "I am this building is me. And I have," here he, it, almost started laughing, and the sound was a terrible one, like choking,"I have worshippers. Followers. Everywhere, they are. Everpresent. You're looking at my necklace," he added suddenly, his voice sudden and hard, making Bakura jump.

"I am looking at it. It's a fine piece," he said, advancing up the stairs into the hollow column. If ice was what coated it, it was strange ice, because it was not cold. At least he did not feel cold. It felt like glass.

"And I am a collector."

Bakura had braved almost all of the steps, standing at the foot of the king whose body had grown into the stones of his palace. He did not fear the so-called worshippers. He did not fear the king.

He had eyes only for the strange piece of metal around the king's neck.

"I would not do that, if I were you."

Bakura's hand stopped in mid-air. He smiled, and withdrew it into his sleeve, starting to pull the glove off.

"Do you even know the year?" he asked, his hand now free.

The king smiled terribly. His face looked as if it would fall off soon, there were cracks appearing everywhere. His hand freed itself from the stone it had grown to with a crackling sound. Some pieces of stone stuck to it and some pieces of skin stuck to the stone. He lifted one metal-sheated finger and touched it to Bakura's face. To the unmarked side. "Asymmetrical. Should I make you symmetrical? I am more and more present than you think, the year is nineteen-thirty-one."

He knew. Bakura was shocked, but not too shocked to know what he was doing. He lifted his hand, the stone of the ring he was wearing on the inside, and pressed it to the king's chest, who gasped and drew his hand back. The building shook.

The linen was cold against his palm, and something under the wrapping moved oddly. His other hand shot out and tore the pendant off.

The king's face twisted. A fissure ran from the corner of his mouth up to his cheek. He raised one arm, the shackles jangling, and the hall was full of scraping sounds.

Bakura whirled around in time to see the first statues climb off their pedestals and advance towards him, stiffly but with a terrible sense of purpose. Their faces were masks and lacking eyes, though some of them had eyes in other places.

Bakura reached behind his back and produced a sawed-off shotgun. He levelled the barrel at one statue that advanced with its arms raised to swing at him, and fired a round. The buckshot buried itself in the stone, which started to crack, but a lot of it was deflected by the metal jewellery.

The king sat absolutely still as Bakura was surrounded by a ring of statues which moved silently. Bakura turned rapidly, trying to keep his eye on all opponents at once, firing round after round at them. A particularly tall statue rushed at him, arms and feelers aiming for his head. He shot into its expressionless face, and the stone shattered into innumerable fragments. It fell.

He whirled around again, catching another living monument under the chin with the butt of his shotgun. The resulting _thump _jarred his arms painfully, but the statue staggered back and collided with two others.

A sudden blow to his ribs made him gasp out and fire blindly in the direction it had come from. A shower of stone fragments nearly blinded him. Bakura jumped back two paces, dodged out of the way of an unidentifiable stone appendage, shot the heads off of two more statues and tripped over his discarded electric torch, which broke. He fell flat on his back, the semi-gloom now completely dark. Something heavy crashed into the floor right next to his head, and he rolled away. The wash of pain in his kidneys told him he'd be pissing blood for a few days.

Bakura scrambled to his feet and fired three rounds in quick succession, jumping from spot to spot to avoid being pinpointed as each shot briefly illuminated the hall.

The statues seemed to be no more able to see than he was. The knowledge that everywhere he fire, he would hit an opponent, was very comforting. Bakura pulled the trigger again. Something collided with his left arm, almost disarming him. He managed to hold on to the shotgun and dodge, but he'd run out of ammo.

Almost spinning in place, swinging the shotgun like a mace, he fired his pistol at anything that made a sound. The floor became slippery with stone fragments, sending him sprawling more than once. Finally the only sound was that of his own wheezing breathing. Then a _clink _broke the silence, followed by what could only be described as a growl. The king was chained to his throne, and couldn't move.

"You will live to regret this," he said with a low voice. In the darkness, Bakura's hair almost stood on end. He breathed in, his ribs protesting.

"Good. That means I'll live." he said, before turning and trying to get some kind of light. It was still completely dark, but if he kept the king talking, he would be able to pinpoint their locations.

"As long as it takes you to hope you were never born," the king replied.

Bakura wondered if he knew how cheap he sounded. The voice, echoing though it was, had come from almost directly in front of him. He tried to listen harder. There was another dull _clink_.

Bakura fired his last three shots at the source of the sound.

There were three brief flashes of light and three explosions of sound. The king's expression as the bullets hit him was more than frightening, it looked as though his face was literally falling apart.

He gasped, a horrible wet sound, and then a short laugh that really scared Bakura.

"That..is not going to kill me, thief. Now you die. Start regretting."

The words where followed by a rumble, and then something crashed down, a few feet away from him. Bakura turned around and walked as swiftly as he could towards the far wall, trying not to trip over the fallen statues and dodging the falling ceiling.

He reached the wall and walked along it, one hand pressed to it, until his hand touched nothingness. This was a door to a tower. He had seen the layout of the place and knew that it didn't matter which tower he went up, as long as he went up.

Then he started to run. The sound of breaking stone and jangling metal was behind him, but he pretended not to care and ran up, always only thinking about the king's words - _I am the building is me_.

He ran up the ramps, going uphill all the way, not stopping to catch his breath.. This was not the way he had gotten in, so he could not retrieve his dropped clothes. The carvings on the walls unfurled past him, telling a story backwards, the stone slabs under his feet shifted where they had lain perfectly still before, and sections of the ceiling crashed down. Once, a sizeable chunk fell on his arm, knocking him to his feet. Bakura felt to check his arm, which hurt like hell, wasn't broken. Then he scrambled up again and ran upwards.

He did not know how he got out, only that he was running towards a rectangle of white light in a sea of murky greyness, and when he climbed through, the cold hit him like a fist. Bakura fell face-first into the snow. Behind him, the building was perfectly silent. After a while, he got enough of his breath back to fumble for his radio. It wasn't there.

It was so cold that his fingers could barely move, and the sleety snow that the wind drove forward cut into the skin of his face. As he stumbled towards the plane, a vague dark blur two miles away, the stolen pendant in his pocket seemed to buzz with energy. He was soon so cold to be numb, and when he reached the plane, he opened the hatch only with great difficulty.

When it was closed again, he crawled into the storage area and wrapped all blankets he could gather around himself. His thawing hands hurt terribly.

Bakura was awoken by a bright light shining directly into his face. He squinted and heaved himself up, shrugging off the heap of blankets in the process. Valon was standing over him with an electric torch pointed directly at his face.

"Get that thing out of my face," Bakura said, shoving the torch out of his line of vision with one hand.

Valon scoffed, "Yeah, you're welcome. Is there a reason that you were out cold and look like hell?"

Bakura struggled up to his feet and looked around. There was another Flettner plane not too far off, not a far better model than his. His hand went to his pocket where the strange, pyramidal pendant was heavy. He walked to the pilot's seat, his legs still stiff from the awkward position and the hits he had taken, and sat down heavily.

"Interference in the ruin. There was," he stopped. He remembered the dead king's face, the king who had claimed to have subjects still, maybe from the time when Antarctica was not yet frozen. Bakura found his tongue suddenly sticking to the roof of his mouth, "there was..something. The ruin looked to be, well, man-made. But the scale's pretty large. Then the roof fell in."

Valon squinted at him, "What, all of it?" He wore green-tinted lenses that were the only thing visible inside the hoof of his coat. "Kefi Bakura," he said, suddenly not sounding like the delinquent he was, but rather concerned, "what in the world happened to your gear? And your face, for that matter?"

"Lost it," Bakura replied, shrugging, "the gear, not the face."

He had found a ration of preserved food in a hatch and was helping himself to protein bars and dried meat, with rather more enthusiasm for the latter than the former.

Shaking his head, Valon chuckled, "I can see that. Okay, back to business. I'm taking a machine to the base. Can you tail me? Are you even able to fly?"

The pendant was more than hot against his skin. Even though there were clothes between him and the metal, it felt as if it was burrowing under his skin. Bakura grinned.

"Definitely."

The engine started up with a roar, the rotating blades kicking up a swirl of snow. Bakura was reminded of his desert. He missed the damn place, even if it had been to hot by half and filled with things that wanted to kill him. But the excitement of subterfuging his way into a tomb, or just blasting the gate out, the knowledge to be the first one to enter this place for generations(except for generations of other graverobbers), couldn't be beat by anything. It was almost worth the occasional fights with things that didn't know how dead they should be.

But the knowledge that you were holding something that the United Kingdom's combat magicians would turn into a weapon of more prestige than practical appliance was not worth remembering the king's shock-twisted expression when he shot him. The pendant itself, though, might be worth as much.

The frozen wind whipped at the plane. Up ahead, he could see Valon's machine being pushed from its course by the storm. Bakura smiled to himself, revved up the engine, and shot past Valon and past the camp, a cluster of small black squares below.

He fully expected another plane to start up in pursuit of his, but the grey shapes next to the camp stayed still. After a moment the radio crackled with static and Valon's distorted voice, „Where the _hell_ are you going?"

Bakura steered the Flettner plane into a curve and saw that Valon was preparing to land in the camp. He leaned to the microphone, „Away. Tell the board I said hello."

He cut the line.

He had been promised a full redemption in exchange for a few missions, which sounded nice. There was also the substantial prospect of rising to his old rank again. Suddenly it didn't sound like such a great idea any longer.

Commander Bakura was dead. He'd been resurrected by a few redemption missions, but he had no real future. Not in going to extremes he hadn't even know _existed _to recover artefacts and then just dropping them into somebody else's waiting hands. The thief had a future.

But judging by the winds that buffeted the plane, and by the pursuit that he could now hear starting up behind him, if he didn't get the hell out of there it would be an extremely short future.

The radio communication system linked his plane to the network of all the Board of Archaeology vehicles. That wasn't good. He would have to disable the radio to make himself harder to track, and then he might have a chance to lose his pursuers in a blizzard. If his plane made it.

Bakura felt in one of the hatches, clinging to the control stick with the other. His plane swerved and accelerated rapidly as his hand shifted forward. Almost knocking his head against the dashboard, Bakura came back up with a hunting knife in one hand. It was serrated and had a heavy hilt, ideal for his purpose. The radio was to his left and he had to lean into the other direction. Fumbling with the stick for a moment, he realized he'd have to kill the radio with his left hand, or twist his arms the wrong way around. Opting for the latter, he managed to crack the radio's casing open with a firm grip on the knife and speed the plane up with the other hand. With any luck, the Board members weren't so brave (or so suicidally stupid) to fly their planes through a storm and would touch down and give up pursuit.

Up ahead, he could see the blizzard's centre. He was flying right towards it. If he managed to make it in and out on the other side, he'd have gained an advantage. The fuel gauge was almost full. He'd made that snap second decision, and touching down to be captured wasn't much of an option now.

Working blind at the radio, because that was slightly preferable to flying his plane blind, Bakura managed to cut through the cables by feel. He dared to look away from the wind shield for a moment, since the view outside was not much else than white anyways. The radio was deader than dead. He increased the altitude until he was flying as high as the Flettner could go, and sped towards the blizzard.

Inside, it was white, which wasn't surprising. But it was different _shades_ of white, swirls of blue-grey that would have been pretty if they hadn't been trying to knock him and his plane to the ground. The Flettner was usually as easy to steer as a whale. In this wind, it was almost impossible. But it was manageable, especially for such a prize as this. A gust of wind hit the plane so hard it lost a few feet of altitude. Again.

Bakura upped the speed to its maximum, a vision of dead eyes in his mind. The king's eyes had been almost the same colour as his own. Behind him, the pursuit fell away in the blizzard. In his pocket, the amulet glowed with warmth, pulsating like a human heart.

**A/N: **In other news, I am being a total Lovecraft geek, in case you couldn't tell. I want to be an antarctic archaeologist. Silly, I know.  
>The first name "Kefi" for Thief Bakura is borrowed from Mandolina Lightrobber (thanks!).<p> 


End file.
